Introduction. Lexicopoeia as a Literary Genre

What is the
minimal unit of verbal creativity? Obviously,a neologism--a single word as a "quantum" of
creative energy. A new word exposes in the most concentrated form the same
qualities ofinvention and fantasy
thatare present in longer
literary texts, such as a poem or a novel.

There are many
varieties of neologisms according to their discursive and social functions:
scientific and technical terms, commercial trademarks and brand names,political slogans,expressive coinages in literature and
journalism…Many authors, such as
Lewis Carrol or James Joyce, weave neologisms into the fabric of theirpoetry or fiction. However, there
should be recognition for a neologism as a self-sufficient literary text that
is not intended for any pragmatic use and is not a part of any larger literary
genre.

I will call
thisgenre of a single word
creation "lexicopoeia." The
word "lexicopoeia" is formed from the Greek roots lexis,
"word,expression"(from legein, “say” and poiein, "to make or compose").Lexicopoeia literally
means word-composition, word-formation.

As the epigraph
to this project, I have chosen Ralph Emerson's saying:

Every
word was once a poem

Actually, lexicopoeia
is nothing but an abbreviation of this
aphorism: the whole sentence is condensed into a single word: lexico–poeia.

Every
word [lexis] was once a poem [poiema]

…and
still IS at the moment of its coinage.

Lexicopoeia is
the most concise genre of literature.Even aphorism seemsobese
and verbose as compared with neologism. If aphorism as a literary genre
corresponds to the sentence as a linguistic unit, then a lexicopoem corresponds
to the word as a minimal element of speech having meaning as such.

The material for
lexicopoeia is provided by formative units of words: roots, prefixes, suffixes
and other morphemes. Not any arbitrary combination of morphemes can be regarded
as a new word, just as not any arbitrary
combination of words can claim to be a poem or a story. A lexicopoem is a minimal literary textthat has its own idea, image,
composition, plot, authorial intention and intertextual connections with other
words.This distinguishes
lexicopoeia as a genre of verbal art from randomcombinations of morphemes. The meaning of alexicopoem cannot be mechanically derived from the
separate meanings of its morphological components.

The word lexicopoeiais an
example of the literary genre that
it designates.This word itself
isa fresh coinage: it has never
been used before in English or any other language. It is absent not only from
all dictionaries, but also from 3 billion pages of the world wide web.

In the process
of assembling this lexicopoetic collection, all coinages were checked on the
web (via Google) to make surenone
has been used before, at least in the sense deployed in this Predictionary.